Lez Liberty Lit #32: Turning The Screw

Books! They are really great. You just won’t believe how great they are. You may think that the Internet’s great, but that’s just peanuts compared to books. Welcome to Lez Liberty Lit, our column about literary shit that’s happening that you should probably care about.

The name “Liberty Lit” was inspired by the short-lived literary journal produced by Angela Chase at Liberty High School in 1994.

Lit Links

“Despite the struggles that go into publishing LGBT YA, I don’t think the prognosis is entirely grim. The number of LGBT YA books has been rising, albeit slowly, and the kind of LGBT YA books being published has been changing. There are more LGBT YA books being published in which the LGBT aspect is not situated as a problem to be overcome; more LGBT YA is simply about a character who is LGBT; and recently there have been more science fiction and fantasy LGBT YA novels. When you look outside the major commercial publishers, there are many more ways to get LGBT YA published today than there were ten years ago. I’m an optimist, so I’m going to interpret all of this as ultimately positive, even if it’s not changing as fast as I’d like.”

Jia Tolentino recommends 12 books that will creep you out, including Sideways Stories from Wayside School, Magic for Beginners, Waiting for the Barbarians, Kafka’s Complete Stories, which perhaps goes without saying, and more.

Or you can read 50 books that will creep you out, a list included here mainly in the hopes that someone will want to talk about The Turn of the Screw in the comments (but also featuring work by Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, Lovecraft, Kafka, Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and more).

There’s been a growing focus on Canadian literature since Alice Munro run the Nobel Prize recently. The Millions has a guide to what to read to catch up, including works by Joseph Boyden, Robertson Davies and Esi Edugyan.

New forms of poetry are thriving online. At the New Yorker, Kenneth Goldsmith writes about less poetic poetry and “more extreme forms of modernism than modernism ever dreamed of.”

What We’ve Been Reading:

Riese: I’m presently reading Terrible Girlsby Rebecca Brown, as recommended by the ladies of Emily Books. I’m always surprised when there’s a lesbian writer I’ve not already heard of! I’m also reading Remote by Jason Fried and David Hansson to make me feel better about the fact that I wish my team was in this room and instead they’re all over the world!

Carolyn: I’ve been reading The Modernization of Sex, which chronicles a few early sex researchers and their findings (or more accurately, “findings”). I’ve also been rereading the Harry Potter series, on and off, because sometimes you want challenging literature and sometimes you want Harry f*cking Potter.

Rachel: I’ve been working on In the Shadow of Magic Mountain for a while now to feed my weird obsession with Erika and Klaus Mann, the bizarre and fascinating queer bohemian kids of novelist Thoman Mann. They EACH SLEPT WITH EACH OTHER’S FIANCES IT’S SO NUTS. It’s overdue from the library, though, so I need to finish this up soon. I’m also in the middle of The End of San Francisco, which I’m super excited to review for the website! When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize recently, I felt embarrassed that I haven’t read more of her work, so I started looking for places to start. I found “Dimension” in the New Yorker and was pretty into it! Worth reading if you like reading about death, prison, put-upon female narrators, or any really long fiction written by Canadians.

Carolyn Yates is the NSFW Editor for Autostraddle.com. She is also a freelance copy editor and writer, and her work has appeared in Bitch, The Toast, Xtra!, Jezebel, and other places. Find her on twitter.

I just finished writing a paper on The Turn of the Screw. I don’t want to talk about it. And I’ll be in my room.
Okay, I lied, I kind of want to talk about it, did it give anyone else nightmares? I had to stop reading it at night. Ambiguity is so scary.

I loved Turn of the Screw. I was also reminded of this book by another one by an author called Carlos Fuentes. The short story is named Aura. I’m sure it’s easy to find it en English.

There’s this very good horror book named “Las visitaciones del diablo” by Emilio Carballido. I can’t find any translation into English but, if you are able to read it in Spanish, it’s very worth the while.

Yay! You've decided to leave a comment. That's fantastic. Please keep in mind that comments are moderated by the guidelines laid out in our comment policy. Let's have a personal and meaningful conversation and thanks for stopping by!